


Break

by bearundersiege



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 22:25:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3398456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearundersiege/pseuds/bearundersiege
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tadashi is tiring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Break

Robert doesn’t know how long he’s been in the office when Tadashi comes in, a mug of steaming coffee in one hand and a doughnut from the café in the other. He edges around the pile shoved high against one of the walls, then places his burden on the desk, seating himself in the chair opposite Robert. 

“Late night again?” he asks. He riffles through the papers on the table, sorting them into five piles—conference, lecture, research, students, and everything else. Robert bats at his hands lightly, but Tadashi persists. It’s a wonder, really, how he’s managed to find anything the past year without the boy underfoot, accordion folders and sticky labels at the ready. It probably helps, he reflects, that Tadashi stops by once a week to make sure he hasn’t yet drowned in reams of paper. 

“Just until Osaka,” he says and leans against his chair. 

“Then there’s Paris, then Munich, then the dozen other places after that and before you know it, you’ll be in the hospital for your blood pressure again,” He slams the file cabinet shut and looks at him askance. “I shouldn’t even have brought you that.”

“And for the sacrifice of your conscience, I thank you,” Robert replies smiling. The voices outside grow fainter, light switches flicking as other students pack up for the night. 

“When will you realize you’re just one man?” 

“I imagine around the same time you realize you’re no longer my assistant,” he shoots back, but Tadashi is too used to him, too thick-skinned to be goaded into leaving, too stubborn to stop when he’s gone farther than he should, too—everything. 

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” He goes back to his computer screen, at the adjustments he needs to make for his new prototype, knowing there is nothing more to be done for the night but unable to leave because Tadashi is looking at him and if there is one thing they share it is an unwillingness to bend when they should have long since broken. 

Tadashi brushes a hand over his, and it takes a good portion of his self-control not to flinch. Instead, he grabs hold of what remaining brain functionality he has left and types half-formed ideas with no visible logic on the screen, careful to angle himself just outside of Tadashi’s reach. 

Robert expects him to leave, but Tadashi’s sense of propriety has never been particularly adept at extending itself to him and vanishes completely when they are without company, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that he stays but it does. And it does more so when an hour goes by he is still there, somehow managing to arrange the room into something almost comprehensible while behind the desk, Robert has three pages of text where the mess in his office has migrated to. 

Sometime later, Robert turns off the computer. Sometime after that, Tadashi follows him outside, humming a song that’s been on the radio incessantly over the last week and keeping a steady pace beside him. 

Tadashi leaves him without a word to the tinkling of the café’s wind chimes. He walks on, through the cold of the wind and into the cold of his house, where he attempts to repair the cracks in which Tadashi Hamada has settled.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what's happening. Nobody knows what's happening. What is this and why did I write it.


End file.
